Why English doesn't use accents

Post by ABS » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 1:03 PM UTC

eahm wrote: post #101

emseetech wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have relatives in Bari so I've been fascinated by Barese. My Italian is not good but I can passively pick it up when listening or watching television, but Barese sounds 100% like a completely different language to me. French and Spanish are more intelligible. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gEKxf8RD-OM

Funny also I moved to USA ~20 years ago and you lose the Italian, you don't remember words etc. but you'll never lose your dialect, it just comes natural because that's how you grew up instead of what you learned growing up and from school, Tuscan people have it easier because the language comes from their dialect, Dante etc. And to add, I wouldn't click that link if you paid me lol, I hate the Barese... ok I clicked…

Post by kps » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

wanderingstan wrote: post #224

kps wrote: post #28

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Yes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).

Interesting! The z80 card in my family’s Apple 2 would render “^” as “↑” and I always wondered the connection. I guess they were using the original spec.

Post by gus_massa » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

zajio1am wrote: post #236

germandiago wrote: post #70

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As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it. Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.

> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. IMHO purely phonemic orthography makes orthography unnecessary complex, as there are language features like assimilation[1] that happens naturally in spoken form but does not make sense in written form. In contrast, morphophonemic orthography keeps systematic and consistent mapping between spoken and written form for individ…

Post by jgwil2 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #136

mousethatroared wrote: post #55

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But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner. But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.

> But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read English than other languages.

Post by dadoum » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #166

jcranmer wrote: post #36

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That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider wo…

> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well. The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries.…